mr. havisham

Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations: still in her wedding dress, still standing by the wedding cake, emotionally frozen at the moment when her bridegroom deserted her decades earlier; now with grey hair, with mice running round the decayed cake, spiders spinning webs unchecked in the dark, candle-lit room, the table still set for the wedding breakfast….

* * *

Yup, that’s the way I now see Plan C:

he’s emotionally frozen at the moment of his wife’s death.

He’s overcome with guilt about all the things he shouldn’t have done to her, determined to make it all up to her now, to preserve her memory, idealize her, recreate, after her death, the marriage they should have had, that he wishes they had had, that they can have now if he only preserves his life and their house exactly as they were when she was alive.

picture copyright Dickens Museum, London

* * *
But he’s not entirely frozen.

Only ten months after her death, he begins dating the first of 84 women, because he wants to live in the present. He wants another woman, companionship, a lively and fulfilling sex life, friends, joy, play, everything. He wants to move on.

* * *
Dating 84 women, none of the dates evolving into significant relationships, he is able to preserve the old life, because nothing comes along to threaten it. He doesn’t know he is Mr. Havisham; he thinks he is moving on, meeting new people, frantically trying to find a replacement for, maybe even an improvement on, the original wife of 36 years.

Nothing challenges him to realize his paralysis, because the 84 women don’t require any movement of the emotions.

* * *
Until February 2008, when he meets me.
* * *
At first, he constructs me as a reincarnation of W, his late wife: in our very first phone call, he talks about her. ‘My wife was a beautiful woman,’ he says, and I wonder, Why is he telling me that? How inappropriate, how odd! – but whatever.

On our first date, he tells me that he met W, also, on a cold Sunday in February, and tells me every detail of their meeting.

On our first date?!

Uh oh. Red flag.

Only a week after we meet, he gives me the last piece of jewelry he ever gave her, saying, in a note, that he wants the last for her to be the first for me, claiming that ’she would have wanted it’ that way.

Oh yeah?

* * *
And yet, several weeks later, when I spend the night at his (their) house the first time, the second afternoon he bursts into tears at the kitchen table, sobbing that he ’should have apologized to her’ before she died.

I’m not so sure of that, myself.

If she was really angry at anything and felt the need of apology, she would have asked for it. She wasn’t timid or too shy to ask for what she wanted: she was strong and articulate. If she let certain behaviors of his slip by, she must not have wanted to talk about them. She knew what she was about.

* * *
And so for a few months Plan C vacillates between two lives, the new one with me, and the old one with W.

I try to give him back the necklace that was hers, but he refuses to accept it.

* * *

The second time I try, he does accept it. That was last weekend.

* * *
Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on a beautiful sunny day in May, our first real expedition together, he stops, half way over, pauses, looks into the distance, and says sadly, ‘W would have loved this.’

* * *

The old life increasingly takes over: Plan C is not in the present. He strives to keep his old life in tact exactly — the little domestic rituals, the shopping, the anniversaries, the golf, and brushing the cat, the only living reminder of their common household.

I become a drag on him, a burden, a weight pulling him away from the life he is guiltily trying to preserve whole. It becomes an effort to visit me. He ceases to find pleasure in our life together, still in process, still evolving.
.
The only thing he looks forward to is golf.

* * *
I have become W. manquée.

She would have ‘let’ him golf on Saturdays.
She would not have disturbed him while he was reading the paper, would have disappeared upstairs into her study.
She would not have required entertainment while they were at home, would have done her own chores, led her own quiet life, let him enjoy his summer Saturdays in peace.
She would not have been demanding.

Sex with me becomes an affront to her: the more fun it is, the more offensive to her, the more destructive of that old life.

* * *

Seeing his therapist every week or so, he rarely mentions W, does not talk about his continuing mourning, and certainly does not talk about, indeed avoids at all costs, his guilt.

* * *
And so things deteriorate in his relationship with me, because I don’t behave the way W did — in his memories of her, at least — and I make demands in the present.

* * *
Things between us come to a crisis (described in the last 3 posts).

* * *
August is coming up, and with it their wedding anniversary (the 39th, it would have been) followed soon by the anniversary of her death.

* * *

Will we make it to August?

* * *
Only if he confronts his Mr. Havisham self. He’s got to — brace yourself for clichés now — fess up to his therapist, tell her truly about his relationship with W, get beyond the guilt, stop casting me as either W-reborn or anti-W, break free of all those volatile emotions, the wild vacillations between guilt and reverence, understand what he’s been doing, get beyond it all, and love me in the present.

* * *
Otherwise, I’m outta there.

* * *

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